A Look Back on 2019 – From the CEO’s Chair

A Look Back on 2019 – From the CEO’s Chair

This week’s blog is from the CEO’s Chair as our CEO, Claire Revell, looks back on 2019.

WOW, what another amazing year we’ve had!

Here’s hoping you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, to those who celebrated, and an early Happy Holidays to those who will be celebrating in a couple of weeks.

This time of year has to be one of my favorites. Everyone is starting to get into the holiday spirit, the streets are filling up with Christmas lights, and the children are on their best behavior! It is also the perfect chance to reflect over the past year. A chance to celebrate everything that’s been accomplished and learn from the challenges that we experienced.

2019 brought yet another expansion to Team TutorPro. However, for me the year was more about redefining roles, sharing the journey with the team members who joined in 2018, and seeing them settle in and grow into their roles.

As we explore new sectors and build on new partnerships, I wanted to hire a CTO to work closely alongside me, helping to define a clear vison and strategy and find ways for our solutions to excel. Julian Tucker, our Senior Developer, was the person for the job, and took the role of CTO in October. This was a big leap for TutorPro but it’s already revealing to be a great decision! Nikki Pope, Business Development Manager, and Julie Campbell, Client Success Manager, celebrated their first year with the team, just last month. They have flourished in their roles, building a wonderful rapport with our Client Family and implemented changes that clients and the business will continue to benefit from.

Back in May, we saw the return of our Client Family Webinars where we review new functionalities that have been released throughout all our products. These webinars are also designed to give our clients the opportunity to ask any product-related questions and share ideas. We have received excellent feedback and have gained a huge amount of value from these webinars. It’s critical to understand how our products need to change and evolve, as our clients’ needs grow.

Our technology
ecosystem has had a plethora of updates, far too many to list (or remember at
once!), but there are a few game changers we can’t forget!!

Quarter One of 2019 saw the launch of Athena version 1.0, our just-in-time, performance support tool. Just last month we released version 2.0. We also released an update to our content creation tool, Live Content Studio, enabling businesses to create live, in application training and assessments for web-based software. Every month, the LMS releases have been jam packed with new functionality. The developers cave went above and beyond once again this year!

Our technical
gurus have completed the server move from AWS to Microsoft Azure, which we are extremely
excited about. The team cannot wait to start leveraging all the benefits Azure brings as we continue to invest
in our product development and look at new technologies.

As many of you know, ensuring the team have a positive work-life balance
is so important to me and we’ve talked quite a bit about self-care and wellness
in recent blogs, too. I cannot express how much it means to me to ensure I have
a team that feels valued. Just this past
quarter we implemented Motivosity, a peer-to-peer recognition platform. It’s a fantastic
tool and it’s wonderful to see the team appreciating each other for
demonstrating our core values. In just a short time I’ve seen how it can help
increase happiness and motivation!

In August, we celebrated 30 years at the forefront of learning technology. What an incredible milestone! As part of that celebration we appeared on an Atlanta Radio Show, and that was quite an experience!

Wanting us to explore new conferences was a key priority for Team TutorPro this year; we attended the ABA TechShow in Chicago in February, the ATD conference in DC in May, and the DevLearn conference in Vegas in October. They all offered an array of new insights and new technologies, each of which was thoroughly enjoyable and exceeded our expectations in every way!

We explored and implemented some new ideas for our marketing which, was very exciting. Not only are we now on Instagram (‘The gram’ to the kids!!) and Pinterest, we also listed our products on Capterra, a review comparison site, and we’re very proud to have all products listed as 5-star.

Christel, Head of Instructional Design, and her team have released some awesome new courses to our library and clients are loving the Quick Reference Guides and Instructor-Led Handouts we started producing earlier this year.

We have a strategy week planned for the first week of January, as we focus on the vision for 2020. The entire team is eager to get this started! We have so many new ideas in the pipeline for 2020 and we are excited about continuing to branch into other industries. We’ve already posted career opportunities opening in the team for Quarter One and Two of 2020, so please do take a look!

As we continue to plan what our journey for next year will look like, we hope that you find time for your personal and professional development.

On a personal note, I would like to say a huge thank you to my husband, Jay, and our boys, Jerry and Aaron. I’ve spent a great deal of time in the U.S. this year and they are always so understanding, supportive and adaptable! I’m truly blessed to have them by my side and look forward to a much-anticipated family vacation to South Africa with them next year.

I want to finish up by saying it’s an honor and a privilege to work with the team, our Client Family, and Business Partners. A MASSIVE thank you to all. We have once again accomplished some astonishing goals this year, and I’m so excited for what the future holds. BRING ON 2020!!